Sounding and Writing a Nepali Public Sphere: the Music and Language of Jhyāure

6RXQGLQJDQG:ULWLQJD1HSDOL3XEOLF6SKHUH7KH0XVLF DQG/DQJXDJHRI-K\ÃXUH $QQD6WLUU Asian Music, Volume 46, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2015, pp. 3-38 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI7H[DV3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/amu.2015.0008 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/amu/summary/v046/46.1.stirr.html Access provided by University of Hawaii @ Manoa (1 Dec 2015 03:56 GMT) Sounding and Writing a Nepali Public Sphere: The Music and Language of Jhyāure Anna Stirr Abstract: This article examines how the interaction between the oral/aural and written aspects of language and song has shaped a modern Nepali-language public sphere and its uneasy relationship with the politics of difference and inequality in intimate life. To do so, it traces the history of the musical and poetic genre of jhyāure in Nepal and northern India, in music and literature from the early nineteenth century through the present, with a focus on how the demotic values associated with jhyāure and orality/au- rality have come to hold a significant place in an idea of Nepali national public space. When I was in jail, I was the only one who could read and write. So it was my job to write letters for all of the other men. They would come and ask me to write a letter home to their sweethearts, and I would write down what they said on paper and then copy it over so it looked nice. I wish I had been able to save those letters! They were all in songs, all in jhyāure. (Name withheld by request) In 2011, a politician from Syangja district, a member of the Nepal Commu- nist Party (United Marxist-Leninist), told me this story of his experiences as a political prisoner in a rural jail in the early 1980s.1 In his narrative, he styles himself as a mediator between his fellow political prisoners and their lovers, and also between written and oral media of communication. His surprise that the letters dictated to him were “all in songs” suggests that he, an edu- cated man, saw letters and songs as two separate genres, belonging to separate spheres. The men who dictated the letters, in contrast, saw jhyāure lyrics as the most appropriate way to send messages of love, whether their rhym- ing couplets were written or sung.2 Had they been in the same place as the ones they loved, the words of love would have been expressed in song. And if the men were illiterate, it is likely that the lovers to whom they sent letters © 2015 by the University of Texas Press 4 Asian Music: Winter/Spring 2015 were as well. So the recipients of the letters would have heard the messages read by someone else: a letter reader analogous to their jailed sweethearts’ letter writer. Writing was a medium transmitting sounded messages, recorded on paper by the letter writer’s hand, and re-sounded at their destinations by those who read them to their intended recipients. While the literate politician might have found this surprising, this meeting of one man’s lettered world with the primarily sounded world of others illustrates an ongoing inter action between the oral/aural and written aspects of language and song, which has significantly shaped a modern Nepali-language public sphere and its uneasy relationship with the politics of difference and inequality in intimate life. Thelok or folk genres of Nepali poetry and song emphasize the sounded aspects of language. Song dominates both the worlds of rural performance and the commercial music market in Nepal. Even the instrumental bands of the past two decades that are oriented toward the world music market primarily play instrumental versions of well-known folk songs.3 In Nepali folk poetry and folk song, which are hard to separate from each other, poetic play with language takes pride of place in performances that involve often-improvised lyrics sung to a set melody, instrumental accompaniment, dancing, flirting, and often eating and drinking. Although this primacy of language contrib- utes to naturalizing the separation of songs from their performed sources and their recontextualization in print and recordings, the poetic meters common to performed, written, and recorded versions of songs continually recall the musical tāl, variations of which in turn index various dance steps (Shah 2037 v.s., 158– 60).4 Poetic meter, a constant as songs circulate through different media, acts as a vehicle not just for the words and their lexical content but also for an entire embodied way of performing and experiencing the performance and everything with which it is associated. This emphasis on the primacy of sounded language in Nepali folk poetry and song has long been bound up with writing, recording, and other forms of inscription. Debates about the written Nepali language, and decisions made by particular publishing houses, have shaped its spoken forms (Hutt 1988; Chalmers 2003). Recording and broadcasting technologies that re-voice both written and aurally heard and remembered text have afforded further im- brication of the written and the sounded (Kunreuther 2004). Laura Ahearn (2001) has also noted that love songs often make their way into Nepali love letters and that the meeting of writing and song has important associations with modernity, ideas of development, and what Lisa Gitelman (1999) refers to as relations of textuality. As Gitelman observes, “Print culture and nonprint media evolve in mu- tual inextricability” (1999, 13). The question is not whether speech or writing (or any other form of inscription) is actually prior or of greater importance Stirr: Sounding and Writing a Nepali Public Sphere 5 but how they evolve together. Gitelman further argues that “contemporary inscriptive forms”—starting with the phonograph—“were deeply dependent upon reworkings of the social and economic relations of textuality, of print culture and print capitalism. They engaged literacy practices in toto, the cog- nitive and the somatic, the semiotic and the social,” and contributed to re- configuring notions of public and private, and social solidarity and social difference (ibid., 13). Following a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that looks at music and language together, I conceive of relations of textuality in terms of oral/aural and written texts, as well as texts in other inscriptive forms (see Faudree 2012; Feld and Fox 1994; Feld et al. 2004; Maskarinec 1995). My own scholarship stands at the intersection of Nepali- and English-language texts in ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore, literary studies, history, and historiography and is grounded in a 15-year relationship with the music of central and western Nepal, including many years as a musician in the region’s pop, classical, and folk scenes, two years of full- time ethnographic fieldwork on folk genres including jhyāure, and ongoing participation as a scholar and performer both in Nepal and among Nepali communities in the United States and United Kingdom. In Nepal, folklore and Nepali literary studies have been the main academic disciplines concerned with changing relations of textuality. Over the past few decades, discussions in these fields have been colored by a concern for nation building that places the origin of the Nepali nation at the time of the Gorkhali conquests and includes the farthest reaches of the Gorkhali state’s territo- ries within the imagined nation of Nepal. In the opinions of several Nepali scholars, musical and poetic exchanges and the development of new region- ally hybrid styles became laudable contributions to Nepali cultural unifica- tion, paving the way for a new national consciousness through the embodied practices of singing and dancing (Bandhu 1989; Pant 1968; D. B. Thapa 2066 v.s.). Thus, these folklorists place great emphasis on these exchanges of song in developing a Nepali public sphere. As Chalmers reminds us, Nepal has been characterized by “nationism rather than nationalism” (2007, 88), with the state searching for ways to create nationhood among a highly ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse populace. The development of a Nepali- language public sphere through oral and print media was thus very important to efforts toward consolidating a national culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, state-led and otherwise, and remains so today, though in significantly modified forms. My argument here focuses only peripherally on the state; rather, I focus on how changing relations of textuality have shaped a Nepali public sphere. Loosely following Habermas ([1962] 1989), I see this as a public sphere of communicative action within which creators of texts—oral, written, 6 Asian Music: Winter/Spring 2015 recorded—have aimed to shape the idea of public space. In this case, I focus particularly on public space imagined as national. This Nepali public sphere is grounded in intertwined concepts of linguistic and national unity, which are both exclusive in their focus on the Nepali language at the expense of the other hundred-odd languages spoken in Nepal and inclusive in their embrace of oral along with written texts as representative of a public sense of nationhood. To address the significance of jhyāure, my concept of the public sphere is extended to embrace what Francesca Orsini (2002) refers to as the “customary”—a sphere of cultural practices and beliefs that overlap both public and private. The oral and aural practices of jhyāure singing, with their “private” love-song topics and their “public” performance contexts, fall into the sphere of the “customary.” This introduction of a third, overlapping space, with its bridging of public and private—a step also toward bridging elite and nonelite spheres—just barely begins to solve the problems that jhyāure brought into the emerging Nepali public sphere: the problem of defining the lines between public and private, and in doing so, also defining lines between genders, classes, and ethnic/caste groups.

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